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The Little Carrier That Wired the Mountains for 35 Years - and Then Sold the Signal to Verizon
For 35 years a homegrown carrier from Wilkesboro put bars on the map where the big networks saw only blank terrain. In 2026 it agreed to hand the signal to Verizon - a small-carrier story about who actually pays to cover a mountain.
Rob Reis
Rob Reis is the founder and President/CEO of Higher Ground LLC, a Palo Alto-based satellite telecommunications company building the world's most compact, affordable, and secure satellite communicator. With roots at Stanford and a career spanning pioneering ventures in laser turntables (Finial Technology), RFID tracking (Savi Technology), and innovation leadership at Texas Instruments, Reis brings decades of deep-tech entrepreneurship to a mission-critical problem: keeping people connected and safe anywhere on Earth, from the backcountry to the battlefield. His flagship product, the SatPaq, uses geostationary satellites with AES-256 encryption and spread spectrum signaling to deliver two-way messaging, voice, and GPS-backup - independent of cellular infrastructure.